Obrázky na stránke
PDF
ePub

become the cross-streets of Minneapolis, and vice versa. St. Paul was founded on the fur trade more than seventy-five years ago at the natural head of navigation on the Mississippi. Minneapolis, built on the Falls of St. Anthony, which effectually blocked navigation farther north on the river, locks an occasional tow through the Government dam in order to call itself the head of navigation -"Me-too." Using the very same dam, with its potential water power, as a decoy, both cities enticed Henry Ford to build his plant in their locality, but St. Paul won out in the site competition. Ford has built the largest motor-car assembling plant in the United States, with a possible pay-roll for 14,000 workers, on the East River Road, where it abruptly terminates one of the finest residential developments in the Mississippi Valley. Minneapolis, figuratively growing vineyards of sour grapes along the corresponding parkways of its uncommercialized West River Road, is working hard to throw another bridge across the river, so that a fair share of the Ford fourteen thousand may spend some of the money they earn in St. Paul on their own side of the river. Minnesota has followed the older farming communities of the United States out of the grain-growing belt to diversified agricul

ture. Very little of the wheat made into flour in the prodigious mills of the Twin Cities is grown in the State. Dairying has become the leading agricultural occupation of Minnesota, which is now the first butter State in the Union. Minneapolis lost out on the Ford plant, but it evened up by bagging the Minnesota Co-operative Creameries distributing plant, representing 475 constituent creameries and nearly 80,000 dairy farmcreameries and nearly 80,000 dairy farmers. And so it goes; competition rather than jealousy; mutual apprehension rather than prejudice or dislike. Possibly it is a good thing; healthy, vigorsibly it is a good thing; healthy, vigorous, conducive to alert citizenship on both sides of a boundary that you more sense than see. So think all the officeholders and most of the journalistic persons, who naturally thrive on separation and rivalry. But undeniably the Twins as one united city, nearly as large as Boston in combined population, would gain more than they would lose by one identity. What is true geographically is becoming more and more true socially and commercially. The big men of business and the big men of affairs know this and some of them admit it. They appreciate the fact that even a nominal quarrelsomeness at such close quarters keeps away desirable citizens and desired investments. As a rule, folks don't want to

.

come to live or found industries in Donnybrook Fair neighborhoods, no matter how good-natured the nagging may be. And the Twins do everlastingly nag each other. One looks askance upon you if you consort with the other, and the local folk-lore is charged with good stories manufactured by one burg at the expense of the other.

In the flour city, for example, they will tell you of how, in a former movement towards the merging of the two communities, when the question of a name for the new and greater municipality came up for discussion, it was proposed that "Minnehaha" might be appropriate, after the name of the falls and the glen near Fort Snelling, given international currency by Longfellow; "Minne" for Minneapolis and "Haha" for St. Paul. And the Paulist Fathers, grimly listening, will recall the story of the little girl, whose family had been dispossessed, making her valedictory prayer:

"Good-by, God. To-morrow we're movin' to Minneapolis!"

Nevertheless, there are real differences between St. Paul and Minneapolis, differences that can better be experienced than told. The impressions are strangely contradictory. St. Paul, considerably older in years, is unmistakably younger in mood. It is franker, more ingenuous,

[graphic]

The head of navigation on the Mississippi River, just below the Government dam and the new Ford plant at St. Paul

[graphic]

less standardized. Like San Francisco, Boston, Charleston, New Orleans, or Portland, Oregon, something prevails impalpably over it that, for want of a better name, may be called atmosphere; there remains a sense of lives greatly lived, of old adventures, of bygone times. The early settlements along the riverbank grew into the later districts on the bluffs without rhyme or reason. In rectangular Minneapolis you can't get lost even without the occasional haphazard designations of streets. But the thorough marking of all street intersections in St. Paul does you no good at all. You are apt to run into "Exchange Street" wandering around in half a dozen localities and without any definite object in view. Within a stone's throw of your destination you can get lost in a variety of purlieus or quartiers, some of them with a flavor almost London-like. Every now and then some radical reformer proposes to unscramble the streets and rebuild according to a city plan; but this will never happen. St. Paul, with the possible exception of Summit Avenue, is less orderly, less composed, than Minneapolis. Neither city is, as a whole, beautiful, as Washington or Edinburgh or Rio is beautiful; but St. Paul is far more picturesque than its neighbor. It clusters around on its seven hills in a Roman sort of way, the dome of an ambitious St. Paul's standing for St. Peter's, and Cass Gilbert's State Capitol dignifying its surroundings. Surveyed from Cherokee Heights on one side of the river,

or the Indian Mounds on the other, the municipal fabric appears patched with neglected open spaces apparently forgotten or ignored in the casual growth of the city about them.

In name and by tradition St. Paul is the conservative, Minneapolis the liberal, community. Something approaching the reverse is in reality the case. In the life of the older city the pioneers have either died off or have passed out of the foreground. Most of the second generation have followed them, and now it is the grandsons who are steering municipal affairs and determining the character of the community. In the much younger town of Minneapolis the pioneers are still actively on deck. Thirty-five or forty of them define Minneapolis even now, and their sons are stepping along in the tempo of the still vigorous older group who, in the last city election, quietly and firmly unseated a radical city government and put in office a solid conservative, if not reactionary, administration. St. Paul, by contrast, seems ultra-progressive. "Art" Nelson, the boy Mayor, elected on a radical constructive platform, is at thirty serving his second con

An example of St. Paul's sublime conception: The Union Station, built at a cost of seven and a half million dollars, and used by nine railroads entering the city at the level of the Mississippi. A ball attended by three thousand couples was held here without in any way disturbing the traffic. Bus lines have subtracted more than a hundred local trains from the vicinity of the Twin Cities

secutive term in office. The city collects conventions even more adroitly than Minneapolis harvests tourists, and as deliberately. Just now, as between the two, it is rather Minneapolis that more deliberately grows while the supposedly conservative Twin, altogether against the grain, you would think, boosts itself far ahead of immediate specifications.

The boosting finds expression in what appear to an outsider splendid unrelated evidences of sublime faith. For years St. Paul talked about a Union Station wherein to combine the terminal facilities of the nine railroads entering the city, then suddenly sank seven million dollars in a magnificent structure far beyond the city's requirements. So vast are its empty spaces that a big ball was given one night in the concourse, where three thousand couples danced undisturbed by the normal traffic. More than a hundred local trains have been recently laid off of schedules in and out of the Twin Cities on account of the everincreasingly convenient bus service over smooth highways of the State and county. In the Minneapolis and the St. Paul daily press of the late summer a strong opposition to the epoch-making

bus was beginning to express itself in the joint umbrage of the railroads and the small towns; the railroads losing local traffic to an alarming degree-as graphically illustrated by the Sahara bleakness of the Union Station-and the small town retailers losing their local patronage by busfuls of marketers bound for the neighboring big cities.

Another evidence of St. Paul's sublime conception is the belt-line sewer running like a young Panama Canal through almost uninhabited environs of the city, where the constructive programme is making ready for future populations with a confidence that touches the heart. The Cathedral of St. Paul's corresponds to St. John the Divine, on Morningside Heights, in New York City, in that both ecclesiastical structures have apparently exceeded the religious demand and the willingness to carry out the undertaking to completion. The exterior of St. Paul's, finished ten years ago, is one of the most imposing church edifices in the West, but the interior remains, not unpleasantly, an expanse of whitewashed brick and stone.

Still another evidence of the big idea is the St. Paul conception of what constitutes an athletic club. Its twelve

story building, attractive within and without, stands up with the Capitol, the Cathedral, the Auditorium, the Great Northern office building, and the St. Paul Hotel, as one of the most conspicuous structures in the city. It is also one of the most significant. It is more of a civic center than an athletic club, patronized almost as much by women as by men, and containing the offices of the St. Paul Association, one of the most broad-gauge and sensible commercial organizations of its kind. Here visiting delegations or -solitary strangers are entertained, and here "Art" Nelson assembles the heaviest taxpayers and the thirty-eight organizations constituting the advisory body of his fellow-citizens to lay before them at well-served dinners the constructive reasons for his bond issues.

St. Paul has the faculty of getting to

TH

gether for good causes, and this faculty it has demonstrated many times in recent years. Potentially, it has the faculty of getting together with its neighboring municipality in the joint endeavors which would make of both a greater unit of influence in American life. Honest rivalry is better than any sham union, and these Twins have been scrapping for more than fifty years. But the honesty of that rivalry does not suffer when the two arrondissements actually do get together for their semi-annual "Twin City Market Week," and a better rapprochement may be foreseen in the movements toward intercity police and transportation regulations.

They used to call St. Paul "Hilltown," with a double reference to its terrain and the leonine railroad builder of the Northwest, whose great stone mansion, crown

ing one of the seven hills at the beginning of Summit Avenue, is advertised for sale as this article is being written. In the same paper printing the advertisement appears the picture of J. J. Hill's grandson, just elected at twenty-three a director of one of the city's largest banks. "The old order changeth, giving place to new." Perhaps no greater things may be looked for from the new generation than were accomplished by their fathers and grandfathers in St. Paul. But different things may be looked for, different attitudes, broader visions. At all events, the city could have no more timely and needful slogan for the character of its future growth than that chosen by the civic association, which expressly looks beyond conventions and tourists and industrial boosting, to larger living-"St. Paul Serves."

The Balance-Sheet of Prohibition

By F. ERNEST JOHNSON

Executive Secretary of the Department of Research and Education
of the Federal Council of Churches

HE situation with reference to National prohibition has apparently reached a "show-down." For one reason or another, the Federal Government has decided upon a new policy of enforcement. That policy, in the opinion of the present writer, is sincerely

undertaken and wisely framed. Its implications are farther reaching, however, than is generally realized.

、་

Until a few months ago the enforcement of prohibition was not a matter of interest at Washington. The Act was passed during the Adon of President Wilson, who and whose States'-rights heart was not in it. The Government policy on this question crystallized under President Harding, whose whole outlook and manner of life made him uncomprehending toward so strong a reform policy as the prohibition crusade had brought upon the country. It is to be said, however, that Mr. Harding reached the point before his death where the whole question of prohibition enforcement acquired a new importance in his thinking, although he did not live to carry out any newly formed purpose. President Coolidge's modest policy of "laissez-faire" in Government matters during the period when he was President only by an accident of history led him doubtless to withhold interference in the difficult matter of enforcing the prohibition law. In the

meantime, an Administrative policy took shape at Washington which was fairly independent of any other policy of the Administration.

A Weak Enforcement Policy

THE situation up to the present year

had two main features. One was the passive-one might almost say irresponsible attitude of higher officials in the Government with reference to enforcement of prohibition. This attitude. was due apparently to a lack of sympathy, a feeble concern, and a weak conviction as to the enforceability of the law. The other main feature of the situation was the aggressive development of a programme by the Prohibition Unit that reflected chiefly a reform psychology. It became common knowledge that the Unit was under the virtual control of the AntiSaloon League. This is not said in criticism of the League. In the absence of a strong policy on the part of responsible Government heads, the leaders of the "Dry" forces stepped in to give the Government the benefit of their experience in building up the machinery of enforcement. It was a natural thing to do, and, considering the circumstances, the constituency of the League would probably have held it accountable for a failure to take aggressive action.

But the results were not wholesome. The impression went out that prohibition

enforcement was dominated by partisan influences, and the more definitely it became identified with such influences the easier it was for Government officials to "let George do it." Attempts to interfere from above were resented by the friends of the Prohibition Unit, and not unnaturally so, because of the apparent lack of sympathy on the part of higher Treasury officials with the law itself. The word went around that prohibition must be kept in the hands of its friends.

So matters drifted on. More and more the campaign methods and psychology of the prohibition movement came to be characteristic of the Government's enforcement policy and programme. The publicity service of the Prohibition Unit has carried many of the loose, ill-considered, fragmentary, inconclusive, and often misleading statements that have been an unfortunate element in the whole effort to win favor for the prohibition régime. Too much attention has been given to petty cases, which occupy space in the newspapers, but are of little significance or value. Prohibition agents are poorly paid, and many of them have suffered moral collapse under unprecedented temptation.

All of this is said by way of interpreting the present situation in the Government. It is not a complete appraisal of the Prohibition Unit. The little group of people at Washington, both inside and

outside the Government, who have been determined to retrieve the fortunes of a

course that was losing popularity, have much to their credit in sincerity, integrity, and downright heroism. From the headquarters enforcement organization down to the agents in the field, not all of whom have been corrupt by any means, most commendable service has been rendered under staggering difficulties.

But it was a losing fight, because the policy that had been slowly developed lacked efficiency and strength of leadership in the Government to repel the ravages of politics, and lacked also a broad-gauge philosophy of social progress that might have won the support of the country. The public has gained the impression of an unwillingness on the part of the Prohibition Unit to face facts and to recognize limitations and failures, a preoccupation with unimportant cases and its failure to clinch the big ones, and an over-fondness for optimistic advertising.

The New Line-Up THE result is that in the new set-up

for prohibition enforcement the influences represented in the prohibition lobby at Washington are conspicuously lacking in prominence. The law is no longer in the "hands of its friends," if by that formula the prohibition leaders at Washington mean persons committed on principle to the purposes of the Volstead Act. The theory that is to prevail from now on is that the law is to be enforced with a maximum of efficiency and a minimum of publicity and without accepting any particular responsibility for modifying the attitude of the public toward prohibition as a public policy. It has become necessary in the opinion of Administration leaders to divorce enforcement from advocacy. This should never have been necessary, but perhaps the wellknown irreconcilability between views of prohibitionists and those of the Secretary of the Treasury made it inevitable. If the psychology of the prohibition lobby has been unfortunate, the failure of the Treasury Department to develop leadership in the vital matter of law enforcement, comparable to that which it has volunteered in National finance, is without excuse. But however one apportions responsibility for the impasse that has developed within the Treasury Department on the prohibition issue, the fact is that we are offered now an entirely new deal. The responsible heads of the Government propose to find out whether or not prohibition can be enforced. If it can, they propose to do it by militant means, if necessary. If not, there are to be no alibis.

Fallacy of Majority Rule

T is a serious misapprehension on the part of prohibitionists, however, to attribute entirely to faulty and inefficient enforcement the reverses that have been encountered in making prohibition effective and realizing from it the anticipated and predicted benefits. One might as well attribute the failure of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution to nonenforcement of it by the Federal Government. When the people, or any very considerable portion of them, turn against a law, there is no longer any question of enforcement-what has happened, then, is nullification. "Majority government," literally construed, is just a political dogma that has no counterpart in reality. A bare majority is quite impotent to govern, and in a matter that is highly controversial and in which large economic interests are at stake only the combined support of an overwhelming majority can bring recalcitrants into line. Where this is lacking, a statute ceases to be a law.

That is what has virtually happened to prohibition in certain sections New York City, for example. With fifteen thousand complaints concerning Volstead Act violations coming before the United States Commissioner each month, the recently appointed Federal District Attorney found it necessary to sweep his office clean of all these petty violations and confine his attention to important cases. Thus, for minor violations of the prohibition law in New York City there is now virtual immunity.

It would of course be misleading to focus attention upon New York or Massachusetts or Maryland and not to relieve the picture by less unlovely exhibits. The Atlantic seaboard is looked upon as foreign territory by prohibitionists in the Middle West. Indiana, for example, to take one of the best, presents a very different picture, and one is not surprised, after a brief inspection of conditions there, to hear it said confidently that prohibition is a closed issue in that State. In fact, there is little doubt that nearly all the States would to-day support the Volstead Act on a referendum vote. But nullification in even a small area is like a cancerous infection. The Volstead Act has given ample proof that no State liveth unto itself. A fact of prime importance for the friends of prohibition to remember is that a continuously divided Nation on this issue means defeat, both material and moral. The The whole Nation must ultimately bear responsibility for the well-being of every part of it. It is all very well to say that no law is fully enforced. The uncomfortable fact is that any law that is as

flagrantly violated as is the Prohibition Law comes to be regarded as a dead letter.

F

Limits of Federal Power

the Federal Government can stop smuggling, illegal diversion of alcohol, and other large-scale violations of the law-which is all the responsibility it may properly be charged with-then it will remain to be seen how persistent is the demand for liquor on the part of the irreconcilables among our citizens. If it continues on the present scale, bringing into existence thousands of small-scale illicit operations, the standing Army would hardly be sufficient to enforce the law. Neither the Federal courts nor Federal Administrative machinery were designed to cope with such a situation, and the issue rests finally with the States and municipalities.

However ably he has grasped the administrative problems of government in the State of New York, Governor Smith is on the wrong side of the facts with reference to the co-operation of State and Federal officials in enforcing prohibition. Theoretically, the duty of a State officer is to uphold the Eighteenth Amendment, and the Volstead Act may be involved in his oath of allegiance to the Constitution. But from the practical administrative point of view co-operation is possible only in a meager way unless prohibition cases can be brought into State courts and that requires a State enforcement law.

Moreover, there is a limit to what any kind of governmental force can do. If people will not accept a law, it is ignored and forgotten. The Anti-Saloon League of Iowa has pointed out the impending danger in a recent exposure of conditions in that State, where, the League declares, a swarm of illicit stills has appeared and lawlessness has been "increasing by leaps and bounds."

[ocr errors]

T

A Bad Stage-Setting

should not be necessary to say that the widespread tendency to discredit prohibition takes all too little account of the conditions under which it was adopted. Many of the disquieting symptoms of a falling moral tone among young people, for example, undoubtedly reflect influences that have long been operative and are wholly independent of any attempt to regulate the liquor tra Young people are out to get "kick" out of life. If the hi their purpose, it is proh incidental. Certainly tomobile is not a p Act!

[graphic]

much of this was due to the War and how much to the imponderable Zeitgeist, who shall say?

BUT,

Some Evident Gains

UT, ineffective as it has been, prohibition has accomplished significant results. The abolition of the saloon is an almost universally admitted social gain. One of the most impressive results. of the recent survey made by the Federal Council of Churches was the negligible character of pro-saloon sentiment. The most immediate beneficiaries have been workingmen and their families. Probably no anti-prohibition sentiment is stronger than that of labor, but with the exception of the anthracite coal fields, where beer is regarded as a "specific" for coal dust in the respiratory tubes, and where the saloon was perhaps at its best as a medium of social intercourse, we found practically no friends of the saloon.

The tremendous curtailment of liquor consumption has made for improved economic status, though to what extent, of course, nobody knows. To claim, as is often done, that the increase in bank deposits during the last few years is mainly due to prohibition is absurd; yet one cannot fail to be impressed by the continued growth of savings accounts during the depression period of 1920-21. Social workers give impressive testimony that living conditions among the clients of social agencies are better than before 1920. The same is true of many other evidences of social well-being.

a

The Reverse Trend

the other hand, as every statisti

tablished during the War would not have
advanced us nearly to the present point
advanced us nearly to the present point
without so precipitate an outlawing of
the liquor traffic. No one would be jus-
tified in putting this forward as a con-
clusion; one can only say that statisti-
cally we are not far enough from the
general "trend line" of the last dozen
years or so to establish a distinct and
permanent achievement.

One fact that even a casual examina-
tion of statistics makes clear is that
crime records which are commonly ap-
pealed to as a proof of the benefits of
pealed to as a proof of the benefits of
prohibition support no such conclusions.
It is, to be sure, highly questionable
whether there is anything approximating
a "crime wave" in the country. Felonies
do not appear to be increasing rapidly.
The increases in offenses fall mainly in
the misdemeanor class. But the total
number of offenses has been growing with
disquieting rapidity. Even the popula-
tion of State prisons, on the basis of the
most reliable data at hand, we found to
have reached in 1923 almost as high a
level in proportion to total population as
in 1917, in spite of the drop between
those years. Municipal police records.
show the total number of arrests to be
far in excess of the number recorded in
1917. Whatever these facts may mean,
crime statistics are frail reeds to lean
upon for the support of prohibition.

The most hopeful element in the situation is the evidence, which is by no means slight, that we have already reached the peak of the reaction and that we may even now be again on the way to overcoming the unfavorable trend that has prevailed since 1920.

The Moral Hazard

cian knows, the significant thing in BUT the seriousness of the problem

t data is not the level, but the And the outstanding fact preeded by social statistics with reference to prohibition is the reversal of the trend of improvement that prevailed from 1917-20. Whether one examines the record of deaths from alcoholic diseases, the incidence of alcoholic psychosis, the prevalence of intemperance as a factor in dependency, the number of arrests for criminal offenses in general, or specifically for drunkenness and disorderly conduct, the result is the same. In 1920, due presumably to the fact that the great psychological reaction to prohibition had not set in and the bootleg industry was in its infancy, there was an impressive falling off in all the familiar effects of the liquor traffic. But from that point, or approximately so, in the curve, a countertendency appears, and while for the most part conditions are better than before 1920, it is seriously questionable whether the favorable trend which had been es

which prohibition presents arises chiefly out of its effect on the public conscience. It is a question how long, even with admitted material and social gains, we could withstand the demoralizing influence of an illicit liquor traffic. Alcohol has too long been the "legal tender" of politics, as a high Government official recently put it, to admit of Governmental recently put it, to admit of Governmental integrity so long as it retains a privileged illicit position. The present struggle of General Andrews to free his hands of political interference is disquieting evidence of the influence of the liquor traffic. What a commentary upon the corroding influence of politics that it was deemed necessary, in order to get the Volstead Act through Congress, to exempt prohibition agents from the Civil Service and turn them over to political patronage! Many sincere friends of prohibition have been led to question whether the demoralization of Federal courts, the growing contempt for a Gov

ernment that remains "dry" in policy, but has so long neglected the task of enforcement, and the conversion of drinking into a great illicit National joke whether all these and related deplorable consequences are not too great a price to pay for such prohibition as we have had. But there is no reason why the future may not efface this pathetic record if citizens who want prohibition to succeed will translate their faith into works.

The churches have been sadly delinquent. They have committed prohibition to the care of a political organization which they created for the purpose and have neglected what is, first and last, the greatest task of all-education in temperate living and in the responsibilities of citizenship. If it was the duty of the churches to aid in an indispensable collective movement to rid the Nation of a social evil, it is much more their duty to further those processes of regeneration and moral rehabilitation for which legislation is a poor substitute. General Andrews disapproved the allocation of $50,000 of the Prohibition Unit's funds for a poster campaign, and in this writer's judgment very properly so. It is the Government's business to enforce the law, not to persuade the people to accept the law.

And the people are not induced to accept a law by being threatened or commanded. Government by epithet and oratory is a weak expedient. Neither will it do to insist that all law and order stand or fall with the Volstead Act. The people know better. They must be won to prohibition on its merits as a social policy, or not at all. Reasoned observance is worth more than compulsion, and its results last longer.

N

Give the Law a Chance ATIONAL prohibition is, by all appearances, about to undergo its supreme test. The occasion calls for a new measure of frankness, of honesty, of tolerance, and of co-operative citizenship. Why should not those who have misgivings about it on grounds of public policy or political theory recognize, nevertheless, that a huge and important social experiment is under way, one that deserves a chance to succeed?

Many persons will find the opinions here expressed quite unacceptable. It is difficult to write frankly on this theme without inviting criticism from friends and colleagues as well as from opponents. On one point, however, the writer hopes. to avoid misapprehension. He is definitely against any "liberalizing" of the National Prohibition Act until it has had a fair trial. Such a fial it has not yet been given.

†ial

« PredošláPokračovať »